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Apple said today that a firmware update to the iPhone due to be released later this week "will likely result" in SIM-unlocked iPhones turning into very expensive bricks. "Apple has discovered that many of the unauthorized iPhone unlocking programs available on the Internet cause irreparable damage to the iPhone's software, which will likely result in the modified iPhone becoming permanently inoperable when a future Apple-supplied iPhone software update is installed," said Apple in a statement issued this afternoon.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs last week reiterated the company's stance on unlocked iPhones: Apple will work against them. "It's a constant cat and mouse game," Jobs said. At that time, we also said that we had reason to believe that the next update to the iPhone would brick iPhones that had been unlocked to use SIM cards from other GSM carriers, which Apple's press release has confirmed. Sources familiar with the matter have told Ars that the company did not decide to cause such irreparable damage to the iPhone intentionally, however, and Apple's statement appears to confirm this as well.

Apple says that it "strongly discourages" users from installing these unlocking programs, and that doing so violates users' iPhone software license agreements as well as voids their warranties. This is corroborated by individual user accounts of being turned away at Apple Stores after having various hacks installed on their iPhones. "The permanent inability to use an iPhone due to installing unlocking software is not covered under the iPhone's warranty," warns Apple.

So what are users of SIM-unlocked iPhones to do? Not run the latest software update, that's for sure. Users can instead pray to the hacking deities—the famed iPhone Dev Team that released the free software unlock, and iPhoneSIMfree, which released a commercial software unlock—to write applications that will undo the unlocks, as it were, if those users want to run the latest iPhone software. And then the teams get to start anew with their hacking efforts on the new firmware. What was that about a cat-and-mouse game again?

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Jacqui Cheng
Jacqui is an Editor at Large at Ars Technica, where she has spent the last eight years writing about Apple culture, gadgets, social networking, privacy, and more. Emailjacqui@arstechnica.com//Twitter@eJacqui